Redrawing Boundaries of Solidarity – Assessing the EU’s Engagement with the Politics of the Black Sea Region Amidst Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Russia’s ongoing invasion and territorial occupation of Ukraine has reawakened concerns about regional spillover across the Wider Black Sea Region in the other potential hotspots of conflict in the South Caucasus and Eastern Europe, namely Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh. Not only has Russia relied on human resources from breakaway regions like South Ossetia for conscription, countries like Georgia and Armenia have also hosted Russian refugees fleeing partial mobilisation. Meanwhile, renewed conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, and the subsequent Azerbaijani blockade of the Lachin corridor, has seen a substantially declining Russian influence in the South Caucasus as Turkish-Azeri partnership appears to be reshaping the patterns of military and energy security and cooperation from the Black Sea to EU. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reawakened a sense of European unity/solidarity, so much so that a ‘European Perspective’ was being discussed with Moldova, Georgia, and crucially, to Ukraine. Whilst shocks like Brexit have consolidated a sense of European identity and undermined the electoral potency of Euroscepticism, so too have Russian atrocities re-vitalized a sense of European-ness, crystallized by Ukraine, and the ‘Associated Trio’ having their ‘European Perspective’ validated with the offer of membership negotiations. Cautious pragmatism has not only informed the multi-vector foreign policy decisions of states caught ‘in-between’ Russia, the West and other external hegemons, it has also been reflected in the EU’s response to countries in the Wider Black Sea Region, favouring bilateral formats. Whilst the EU’s cautious approach to its neighbours through its dominant instrument of the Eastern Partnership and its enlargement agenda in the Western Balkans, there has been an overlooked regional architecture which has grouped all of the relevant parties for over 30 years; the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). Its expansive membership of the BSEC - which welcomed North Macedonia as its newest member in 2019 – has come to define and represent the wider Black Sea region, a region characterised by the coexistence of fragmentation and cooperation. Despite the shortcomings of BSEC’s ‘de-politicised project-based’ format of cooperation, it is the most enduring Post-Soviet regional format which sits at the intersection of Russian imperialism on one end and EU integration on the other. In light of Russia’s ongoing war and the EU’s renewed interest in the region, this paper seeks to scrutinise the role played by the EU in the region’s existing multilateral structures, namely the BSEC, given not only the EU not only has observer status in BSEC, but 3 of its member states (Greece, Bulgaria & Romania) have been founding members of the BSEC. This begs the question over how the EU has influenced patterns of regional solidarity in the Wider Black Sea Region. In doing so, this paper argues that the EU has pursued a form of reluctant hegemony in the Black Sea, typified by a preference for bilateral ties at the expense of embracing the opportunities offered by multilateral cooperation for instilling a broader regional solidarity.